The Throat

by Peter Straub

  “Someone left money to my son?”

  “The name of the recipient, at least as it’s listed on the policy here in front of me, is Fielding Bandolier. Did you adopt Mr. Bandolier?”

  “Oh, no. We didn’t adopt him. Fee was my sister’s boy.”

  “Could you tell me Fielding Bandolier’s present location, ma’am?”

  “Oh, I know what happened,” she said. “It must be, Bob died. Bob Bandolier, Fee’s dad. Is he the one who left that money to Fee?”

  “Robert Bandolier was our policy holder, that’s right, ma’am. He was the beneficiary’s father?”

  “Well, yes, he was. How did Bob die? Are you allowed to tell me that?”

  “I’m afraid it was a heart attack. Were you close?”

  She uttered a shocked little laugh. “Oh my, no. We were never close to Bob Bandolier. We hardly ever saw him, after the wedding.”

  “You said that Fielding Bandolier no longer resides at your address?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “There’s nobody here but senior citizens. Only about five or six of us have our own telephones. The rest of them wouldn’t know what to do with a telephone.”

  “I see. Do you have a current address for the beneficiary?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “How long did he reside with you, ma’am?”

  “Less than a year. After I got pregnant with my Jimmy, Fee went to live with my brother Hank. Hank and his wife, my sister-in-law, Wilda? They had a real nice home in Tangent, that’s about a hundred miles east of here. They were real nice people, and Fee lived with them until he graduated high school.”

  “Could I trouble you for your brother’s telephone number?”

  “Hank and Wilda passed away two years ago.” She did not speak for about fifteen seconds. “It was a terrible thing. I still don’t like to think about it.”

  “They did not die of natural causes?” I heard a suppressed excitement in his voice.

  “They were on that Pan Am flight—103, the one that blew up right in the air? Over Lockerbie, in Scotland? I guess they have a nice memorial over there, with my brother’s name and Wilda’s on a kind of a plaque? I’d go over there to see it, but I don’t get around too good these days, with the walker and everything.” There was another long pause. “It was a terrible, terrible thing.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” What probably sounded like sympathy to her sounded like disappointment to me. “You said that your nephew graduated from high school in Tangent?”

  “Oh, yes. Hank always said Fee was a good student. Hank was the vice-principal of the high school, you know.”

  “If your nephew went on to college, we might get his address from the alumni records.”

  “That was a big disappointment to Hank. Fee went down and joined up in the army right after he graduated. He didn’t even tell anyone until the day before he was supposed to be inducted.”

  “What year would that have been?”

  “Nineteen sixty-one. So we all thought he must have gone to Vietnam. But of course we couldn’t know.”

  “He didn’t tell your brother where he was assigned to duty?”

  “He didn’t tell him anything. But that wasn’t all! My brother wrote to him where he said he was going, for basic training? At Fort Sill? But his letters all came back. They said they didn’t have any soldier named Fielding Bandolier. It was like running up against a stone wall.”

  “Was your nephew a troubled boy, ma’am?”

  “I don’t like to say. Do you have to know about things like that?”

  “There’s a particular feature of Mr. Bandolier’s policy that might come into play. It allowed him to make smaller payments. What the provision states is that payment of the death benefit is no longer in effect should the beneficiary, I’m reading this right off the form here, be incarcerated in any penal institution, on parole, or in a mental institution of any kind at the time of the death of the policy holder. As I say, this provision seldom comes into force, as you can imagine, but we do have to have assurance on this point before we are allowed to issue payment.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “Did your brother have any feeling for what sort of work our beneficiary was interested in taking up? It might help us locate him.”

  “Hank told me once that Fee said he was interested in police work.” She paused. “But after he disappeared like that, Hank sort of wondered if—you know, if he really knew Fee. He wondered if Fee was truthful with him.”

  “During the year he lived with you, did you notice any signs of disturbance?”

  “Mr. Bell, is Fee in some sort of trouble? Is that why you’re asking these questions?”

  “I’m trying to give him five thousand dollars.” Tom gave her a good, hearty insurance man laugh, the laugh of a member of the Million Dollar Round Table. “That may be trouble to some, I don’t know.”

  “Could I ask you a question, Mr. Bell?”

  “Of course.”

  “If Fee is somewhere like you say, or if you flat can’t find him, does that insurance money go to the family? Does that ever happen?”

  “I’ll have to tell you the simple truth. It happens all the time.”

  “Because I’m the only family left, you see. Me and my son.”

  “In that case, anything you can tell me could be even more useful. You said that Fee went to Tangent, Ohio, when you found you were pregnant?”

  “With my Jimmy, that’s right.”

  “Was that because you did not feel that you could cope with two children?”

  “Well, no.” Pause. “That was why I asked about, you know. I could have brought up two children, but Fee was like a boy who—like a boy a normal person couldn’t understand. He was such a little boy, but he was so private. He’d just sit staring into space for so long! And he’d wake you up screaming at night! But never talk about it! So closed-mouthed! But that’s not the worst.”

  “Go on,” Tom said.

  “Well, if what you say is right, my Jimmy could use that money to help get a downpayment.”

  “I understand.”

  “It’s not for me. But that money can come to the family if Fee is like you say. Incarcerated.”

  “We’ll be going over the policy to make that determination, ma’am.”

  “Well, I know that Fee took a knife from my knife drawer once and went outside with it, and that same day, I mean that night, one of our neighbors found their old dog dead. That dog was cut. I found the knife under Fee’s little bed, all covered with dirt. I didn’t think he killed that dog, of course—he was just a little boy! I didn’t even connect it with my knife. But a while later, a dog and a cat were killed about a block away from our house. I asked Fee right out if he was the one who did those things, and he said no. I was so relieved! But then he said, ‘There isn’t any knife missing from the drawer, is there, Mama?’ He called us Mama and Papa. And I just, I don’t know, felt a chill. It was like he knew that I counted those knives.”

  The quavery voice stopped talking. Tom said nothing.

  “I just never felt right about Fee after that. Maybe I was wrong, but I couldn’t stand the thought of bringing a baby into the house if he was still living with us. So I called Hank and Wilda.”

  “Did you tell them anything about your doubts?”

  “I couldn’t. I felt terrible, having all these bad thoughts about my sister’s boy. What I said to Hank was, Fee wasn’t screaming at night anymore, which was the truth, but I still thought he might upset the baby. And then I went and talked to Fee. He cried, but not for very long, and I told him he had to be a good boy in Tangent. He had to be a normal boy, or Hank would have to put him in the orphan home. It sounds just awful, but I wanted to help him.”

  “He did well in Tangent, didn’t he?”

  “Just fine. He behaved himself. But when we drove over to Tangent, Thanksgivings and such, Fee never looked at me. Not once.”

  “I see.”

&n
bsp; “So I wondered,” she said.

  “I understand,” Tom said.

  “No, sir, I don’t think you do. You said you’re in Millhaven?”

  “At the Millhaven office, yes.”

  “That Walter Dragonette was on the front page right here in Azure. And when I first heard about him, I just started to shake. I couldn’t eat a bite at dinner. Couldn’t sleep at all that night—I had to go down to the lounge and watch the television. And there was his picture on the news, and he was so much younger, and I could go back up to my room.”

  Tom did not say anything.

  “I’d do the same thing I did back then,” she said. “With a new baby in the house.”

  “We’ll be in touch, ma’am, if we cannot locate the beneficiary.”

  She hung up without saying good-bye.

  20

  TOM HAD TILTED HIMSELF back in his desk chair and was staring at the ceiling, his hands laced together behind his head, his legs straight out before him and crossed at the ankle. He looked like a bored market trader waiting for something to show up on his Quotron. I leaned forward and poured water from a crystal jug on the table into a clean glass. On second thought, he looked too pleased with himself to be bored.

  “Extraordinary place names they have in Ohio,” he said. “Azure. Tangent. Cincinnati. They’re positively Nabokovian. Parma. Wonderful names.”

  “Is there a point to this, or are you just enjoying yourself?”

  He closed his eyes. “Everything about this moment is extraordinary. Fee Bandolier is extraordinary. That woman, Judy Leatherwood, is extraordinary. She knew exactly what her nephew was. She didn’t want to admit it, but she knew. Because he was her sister’s child, she tried to protect him. She told him he had to act like a normal child. And the incredible child could do it.”

  “Aren’t you making a lot of assumptions?”

  “Assumptions are what I have to work with. I might as well enjoy them. Do you know what is really extraordinary?”

  “I have the feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  He smiled without opening his eyes. “This city. Our mayor and chief of police get up on their feet at April Ransom’s funeral and tell us that we are a haven of law and order, while, against odds of about a million to one, we have among us two very dedicated, utterly ruthless serial killers, one of them of the disorganized type and only recently apprehended, and the other of the organized type and still at large.” He opened his eyes and brought his hands forward and clasped them in his lap. “That really is extraordinary.”

  “You think Fee killed April Ransom and Grant Hoffman.”

  “I think he probably killed a lot of people.”

  “You’re going too fast,” I said. “I don’t see how you can pretend to know that.”

  “Do you remember telling me why Walter Dragonette thought he had to kill his mother?”

  “She found his notebook. He made lists of details like ‘red hair.’ ”

  “And this is pretty common with people like that, isn’t it? They want to be able to remember what they’ve done.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  There was an anticipatory smile on his face. “You wouldn’t want anyone else to find your list, would you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And if you kept detailed notes and descriptions, you’d have to put them in a safe place, wouldn’t you?”

  “As safe as possible.”

  Still smiling, Tom waited for me to catch up with him.

  “Someplace like the basement of the Green Woman, you mean?”

  His smile widened. “You saw the impressions of two boxes. Suppose he wrote narratives of every murder he committed. How many of these narratives would it take to fill two boxes? Fifty? A hundred?”

  I took the folded paper from my shirt pocket. “Can you get into the Allentown police records? We have to find out if this woman, Jane Wright, was murdered there. We even have an approximate date: May ’seventy-seven.”

  “What I can do is scan the Allentown newspapers for her name.” He stood up and put his hands in the small of his back and stretched backward. This was probably Tom’s morning exercise program. “It’ll take a couple of hours. Do you want to wait around to see what turns up?”

  I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly seven. “John’s probably going out of his mind again.” As soon as I said this, I gave an enormous yawn. “Sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m tired.”

  Tom put a hand on my shoulder. “Go back to John’s and get some rest.”

  21

  PAUL FONTAINE stepped out of a dark blue sedan parked in front of the Ransom house as I walked down the block from the spot where I’d left the Pontiac. I stopped moving.

  “Get over here, Underhill.” He looked almost incandescent with rage.

  Fontaine unbuttoned the jacket of his baggy suit and stepped back from the sedan. I smiled at him, but he wasn’t having any smiles today. As soon as I got within a couple of feet of him, he jumped behind me and jammed his hands into the small of my back. I fell toward his car and caught myself on my arms. “Stay there,” he said. He patted my back, my chest, my waist, and ran his hands down my legs.

  I told him I wasn’t carrying a gun.

  “Don’t move, and don’t talk unless I ask you a question.”

  Across the street, a little white face appeared at a downstairs window. It was the elderly woman who had brought coffee to the reporters the day after April Ransom was killed in Shady Mount. She was getting a good show.

  “I’ve been sitting here for half an hour,” Fontaine said. “Where the hell were you? Where’s Ransom?”

  “I was driving around,” I said. “John must have gone out somewhere.”

  “You’ve been doing a lot of driving around lately, haven’t you?” He made a disgusted sound. “You can stand up.”

  I pushed myself off the car and faced him. His rage had quieted down, but he still looked furious. “Didn’t I talk to you this morning? Did you think I was trying to amuse you?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  “Then what do you think you’re doing?”

  “All I did was talk to some people.”

  His face turned an ugly red. “We got a call from the Elm Hill police this afternoon. Damn you, instead of paying attention to me, you and your pal went out there and made everybody crazy. Listen to me—you have no role in what is going on in Millhaven. You get that? The last thing we need right now is bullshit about some—some—” He was too angry to continue.

  He jabbed his index finger at me. “Get in the car.”

  His eyes were blazing.

  I moved to open the back door of the sedan, and he growled, “Not there, dummy. Go around and get in the front.”

  He opened his door and kept blazing at me as I walked around the front of the car and got in the front seat. He got behind the wheel, slammed his door, and wrenched the ignition key to the side. We streaked off down the street, and he tore through the stop sign on Berlin Avenue and turned left in a blare of horns.

  “Are we going to Armory Place?”

  He told me to shut up. The police radio crackled and spat, but he ignored it. Fontaine simmered in silence all the way downtown, and when he hit the on-ramp to the east-west expressway, he thumped the accelerator. We hurtled out into the westbound traffic. Fontaine careened through the other cars, ignoring the cacophony, and got us into the fast lane without actually hitting another car. I managed not to put my arms in front of my face.

  He kept his foot down until we reached seventy-five. When a red Toyota refused to get out of his way, he flashed his lights and held down the horn until it swerved into the next lane, and then he roared past it.

  I asked where we were going.

  His glare was as solid as a blow. “I’m taking you to Bob Bandolier. Do me a favor and keep your mouth shut until we get there.”

  Fontaine blew the cars in front of us into smoke. When the stadium floated into view, he fl
icked the turn indicator and changed lanes at the same time. Brakes squealed behind us. Fontaine kept moving in an implacable diagonal line until he got across the expressway. He was still doing seventy when we squirted onto the off-ramp. Holding down the horn, he blasted through a red light. The tires whined and the car heeled over to the left as he dodged through the traffic and turned south. We roared past the stadium and slowed down only when we reached Pine Knoll.

  Fontaine turned in through the gates and rolled up to the guardhouse. He cut off the engine. “Okay, get out.”

  “Where am I going to meet him, in the afterlife?” I asked, but he left the car and stood in the slanting sun until I got out and walked toward him, and then he began moving quickly up a gravel path toward the area where my parents and my sister were buried. By now, I was regretting my crack about the afterlife. The sprinklers were quiet, and the groundskeeper had gone home. We were the only people in the cemetery. Fontaine moved steadily and without looking back toward the stone wall at the far left.

  He left the path about thirty feet before the row of graves I had visited earlier and led me up along a row of graves with small white headstones, some decorated with bright, wilting roses and lilies. He stopped at a bare white marker. I came up beside him and read what was carved into the stone. ROBERT C. BANDOLIER 21 SEPTEMBER 1919—22 MARCH 1972.

  “You have anything to say?”

  “A Virgo. That figures.”

  I thought he was going to hit me. Fontaine unclenched his fists. His saggy face twitched. He didn’t look anything like a comedian. He stared at the ground, then looked back up at me. “Bob Bandolier has been dead for twenty years. He did not ignite the propane tanks at the house in Elm Hill.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Nobody is interested in this man.” Fontaine’s voice was flat and emphatic. “You can’t prove he was the Blue Rose killer, and neither can anyone else. The case came to an end in 1950. That’s that. Even if we wanted to open it up again, which would be absurd, the conclusion would be exactly the same. And. If you keep wandering around, stirring things up, I’ll have you shipped back to New York on the next available flight. Or I’ll arrest you myself and charge you with disturbing the peace. Is that clear?”